Maybe we can turn the crazy back on the Republicans. Start spreading rumors that the Republicans are plotting against the American people (it would not be technically untrue). Start sending out emails saying, “members of Congress are giving THEMSELVES nice, juicy FREE BENEFITS like a COMPREHENSIVE health care package–and they’re working hard to see that YOU don’t get in on it!” Or, “politicians in Washington are trying to KILL American BABIES and the ELDERLY by keeping them on substandard insurance!”

The key points of the campaign would be: (1) don’t name Republicans or the party; keep the culprits vague; (2) make it sound threatening and ominous, like there’s a conspiracy and you or someone you love WILL DIE if nothing is done; (3) use lots of capital letters, and, if possible, use the the Comic Sans font–for some reason, that seems to make it more “folksy,” and therefore it must be REAL.

It’s just stupid enough to work!

Claiming that they are only “using their rights” as Americans, about a dozen men–at least one carrying a military-style assault rifle–populated the crowds outside the Obama event in Phoenix today. As I remarked before, the one guy outside the event last week went far too far, so a dozen should be that many times more chilling. What seems to have tempered the display is that none, at least as far as I can tell, were bearing signs that intimated that they wanted to actually kill Obama, as was the case with the armed protester in Montana. Nevertheless, the display was chilling.

The protesters simply contend that they were exercising their rights; Arizona, where the event was held, is an “open carry” state, where you can carry a gun in public so long as it is out in the open. If these gun advocates are worried that Obama is going to take away their gun rights (which they really have no reason to be, as Obama has not only made his stance on this clear, but has actually loosened some gun laws), then one might understand a display. However, there is a difference between a display and a threat. If the men had shown up, displayed their weapons for some cameras, made a statement, and then packed away the guns–in other words, made the point about bringing guns and then demonstrated that they meant no ill will–that would be a display.

However, when a president travels, assassination is always a primary concern. To simply have men bearing guns, including assault rifles, milling about crowds of protesters making rather outlandishly hostile rants about the president, some signs even advocating his death, goes beyond simple protest and enters the realm of real security issues. Most surprising to me is the apparently lax attitude the Secret Service is taking to all this.

There is also the question of right in context. One has the right to free speech, but you cannot endanger others; I can shout “Fire!” at a gun range, but not in a movie theater. Depending on the context, one is perfectly appropriate, the other is criminally irresponsible. In the context of a presidential visit, bearing a gun is, in my opinion at least, criminally irresponsible. Bearing a gun is a right, freely speaking is a right, but bearing a gun while making death threats? I don’t think that’s a right. And bearing a gun to a political event definitely strays into that territory: there is a very real, implied threat being made.

Besides, if the real idea here is just exercising rights, then where were these people during the Bush administration? People were getting arrested for shouting non-violent anti-Bush slogans or even just wearing critical T-shirts near Bush events; had anyone then shown up with a gun, they probably would have been arrested on the spot. No one seemed to want to test their gun rights then, did they?

Add that to the fact that Obama has only been friendly to relaxing gun laws and you get the clear impression that the whole “gun rights” claim is not a reason, but an excuse to make thinly veiled death threats against the president of the United States of America. There is a difference between exercising your rights and hiding behind them.

Just took my final exam for Intermediate Algebra last night. I don’t know the exact final score, but am pretty certain that I’ll be getting more than 500 of the 510 points the class tops out at, so, whew. I can honestly say it wasn’t achieved through remembering what I did last time–that was 20 or so years ago, and I literally forgot just about everything. This was a hard slog. Being (a) more mature and (b) a teacher helped a lot, as my study habits were somewhat improved, and I know much better what is important. As a student, you tend to just do what you’re told blindly, going through the motions of study because that’s what the teacher assigned, and then expect that you will magically know the material by the last page of the chapter. Instead, you have to focus on actually understanding the material, using the best techniques (proper note-taking, asking for help, etc.) for you to do so. If you finish a section and still don’t understand, then you can’t just go on–you have to re-orient and come at the material from a new angle. You can’t depend on the teacher as much as you do on yourself.

In any case, I can finally leave all that behind and spend the next two semesters in which I will take classes online focusing on actual computer stuff. Which is the whole reason why I’m taking courses again.

Unfortunately, the Intro to Programming course I was looking forward to has been taken off the roster for Fall, though it is offered through something called “BlendEd,” which is a regular on-site class where people can take portions of it–or all of it–online. I’m just concerned that I’ll be the only one doing it online, and effectively by myself. Hrm. There is another class I would take–Database Basics, which is not so terrible (I could use training in that), and it is online. We’ll see.

Now I can finish up the last business for my last semester of classes–the ones I teach, not the one I am taking as a student–and then get on to planning my classes (to teach) for the Fall.

There is a conservative mindset that jobs are manna from the corporate heavens, and that we workers should be grateful for the lavish and philanthropic beneficence of businesses to grace us with jobs, as if it were a special favor they were doing us.

Let’s get this straight: employment is a two-way bargain which benefits both sides, hopefully equally–but all too often more to the benefit of the corporation. A company does no more a favor to a person by hiring them than the person does to the company by doing work for them. It is an exchange of currency for labor, plain and simple.

A company needs people working for it just as much as the workers need the jobs. Neither can survive without the other. But because there are usually more workers than there are jobs, businesses tend to be at an advantage and demand obeisance from the worker (who calls whom “sir”?), and often abuses that power. A company is rarely cowed by an employee’s threat to quit, but employers commonly cow workers with threats of firings. More than once I have been thoroughly rogered by an employer which understood very well that I would suffer a great deal before surrendering my job, and used that to steal from me (no exaggeration–I once had an employer literally steal $700 from me, and another I had to sue to get them to cough up more than $500 in unpaid wages). In the first case, I was threatened with termination if I complained too much; in the second, I had already quit. (This is why I like where I work presently; I am well taken care of by my employer back in the U.S., a not-for-profit institution.)

When a business hires an employee, it is by no means an act of munificence. For-profit employers, as a rule, try to get as much as they can from an employee for as little as they can get away with paying. They do their hardest to hire the best talent they can manage, and pay only what they know they have to, by law or by the standard minimally expected to attract the required talent.

But generous? Forget it. The laws requiring a minimum wage, labor laws about working hours and conditions, rules and regulations protecting employees from fraud or abuse are there for an excellent reason: left unchecked, businesses will abuse their employees. If businesses were so kind to their workers, none of these checks would be necessary. This is simply the nature of a corporation: it wants money, its chief goal and reason for existence. A few liberal corporations will treat their workers well under the philosophy of enlightened self-interest, knowing that if they treat their workers well, their workers will perform well. But Wall Street frowns on this, castigating firms which it feels are too generous to the worker at the immediate cost of the almighty shareholder in their never-ending quest to wring every last dollar of short-term profit out of a business.

So let’s abandon the conservative myth that somehow corporations are gracing us with their altruistic, magnanimous charity by allowing us the great privilege of working for them so they can collect a profit from our labor.

This BBC story shows how the American right-wingers are using a lone extremist British politician and duping British citizens to support the completely false impression that British health care is (a) ineffective and (b) reviled in Britain, when in fact it provides complete coverage to all Brits at half the relative cost (as % of GDP) Americans pay and is widely loved despite its flaws.

Always a dangerous combination if you’re a compulsive liar like Glen Beck:

Jump this link and watch the video of Lawrence O’Donnell interviewing a young woman named Katy Abram who asked a scathing question to Arlen Specter at a town hall meeting. Her question was this:

I don’t believe this is just about health care, it’s not about TARP, it’s not about left and right. This is about the systematic dismantling of this country. I am only 35 years old, I have never been interested in politics, you have awakened the sleeping giant. We are tired of this. This is why everyone in this room is so ticked off. I don’t want this country turning into Russia, turning into a socialized country. My question for you is, what are you going to do to restore this country?

If you watch the interview with O’Donnell, you come away with the impression that this woman is not some hardened right-winger, that she’s not some ideologue, nor that she is unintelligent. What you do come away with is the understanding that this is a person who seems to have listened to the people who are trying to frighten her, and it has worked–and that she looked no further to understand the issues she addresses at the town hall meeting, else she would understand how embarrassingly uninformed she sounds.

She states as the primary issue the concern that America is being dismantled. On that, she is right; where she is wrong is who is dismantling it. She did not speak out while the Fourth Amendment was crassly violated and trashed, nor while the Supreme Court was stacked with those who showed clear disdain for the Ninth Amendment and wanted to warp the meaning of the First Amendment. She stood still while trillions were handed out to corporations and the wealthy at her expense, and while the Iraq War was falsely started, again at the cost of trillions of dollars she would be responsible in the form of debt. She remained faithful to her country during those times, and yet when a new president comes in and wants to reform health care so that she has more choice and it will cost her less, she immediately lost faith and believes that the Constitution is being dismantled and we are turning into Russia. There is little or no doubt that she watches Fox News.

She fears that her country is “turning into Russia,” turning into a socialist or communist state. Presumably this is because she fears that we will be forced to all participate in a single-payer socialized health care system, apparently unaware that many elements of our society are “socialized” and she likely does not object to them–does she opposed publicly funded fire departments? Police protection? National defense? Medicare? Social security? She simply does not understand that social insurance programs are not what defines a “country like Russia,” and that her fuzzy half-remembering of Obama allegedly saying he wanted a single-payer health system many years ago is not equal to the specific legislation now before Congress. She speaks so kindly yet so painfully without real understanding about how the founders didn’t want socialism and felt that those who had wealth would help those without, not seeing that she has become the spokesperson for those with immense wealth who have savaged the poor and the middle class and want to keep on doing it.

She sees things “pushed through very quickly,” and yet had no trouble with the “Patriot” Act or with the trillions-dollar tax cuts for the rich, which were pushed through just as quickly or even more quickly. She apparently had no trouble with the Iraq War, which was devastating in terms of costs in more than just a monetary way. She claimed only to “have faith in the government,” and she “didn’t really care.” But now she’s all furious and scared?

The poor young woman even admits that she doesn’t know the issues too well, she doesn’t know even what her own income is or how these policies would truly affect her, that she is not very politically aware. She doesn’t even seem to understand what Medicare is.

She comes across as a very sweet, caring, concerned person, cutting a very sympathetic figure–but also a person who has little or no understanding of what she is talking about. One gets the very strong impression that if she were to take the time to study, to come to actually know the issues, to understand the history, and see the situation for what it is, she would probably be completely in favor of the current health reform package.

Hopefully, this incident will not hurt her emotionally to the extent where she will withdraw from the issues, nor will it drive her easily into the arms of the mobs she is already associated with, who will offer her emotional support because she is aligned with their cause, but no truth or real understanding. Hopefully she will react to this the same way I reacted to my first scathing, embarrassing social drubbing upon my own entrance into public debate, and react instead by a strong desire to research, fully understand the facts, and re-enter the debate more informed, no matter which side she eventually comes out on.

But what good she has done is to shine a light on why so many sympathetic, well-meaning Americans are so completely wrong on the issues: because they don’t know the situation very well, are so easily gulled by those who would blatantly misinform them, and just don’t seem to have the built-in capacity–or, at least, the time and necessary resources–to strike out independently and inform themselves.

Hers is a movement which depends on people like that, which depends upon people being uninformed and scared to death. It uses people like her. She is not her own person, because she depends on others to handle things like knowing the facts. She simply trusts what others say, and works from that. And, like so many millions of Americans, she is being used against her own best interests, against the interests of her children.

Knowledge is power. Without knowledge, one becomes used.

Update: In the comments, a visitor pointed out the DailyKos story in which it was found that Ms. Abram has been a member of meetup.com since 2006 and lists group interests as being “Conservatives” and “Glenn Beck.” While this sounds like she’s been into both those categories since 2006, it could also mean that she’s just been a member of the service since 2006 and added those specific interests only recently. The fact that she scrubbed the interests from her meetup page suggests that she didn’t want these things to be known, but doesn’t necessarily mean that she was lying previously; she may just want to avoid being dismissed as an ultra-partisan.

For me, this primarily just confirms one thing that I even predicted in the main post: that the TV channel kept on in her home is Fox “News.” That she’s a Glenn Beck fan is even more revealing, as he is the nexus of insanity on that network. It doesn’t mean that Ms. Abram wasn’t gulled or that she’s somehow a bad person–but on my humble opinion, anyone who is a Glenn Beck fan is more than likely not an innocent sheep, and not someone who will try to become an informed person as I had hoped. The likelihood is that she is and always has been strongly partisan, only finding enough fear to protest as of late.

My bet is that her claim about not being “politically aware” before Obama came to office simply meant that she has always been strongly conservative and cheered Bush on in everything he did–and then, like many other tea-baggers, she started to see the End of the World when Obama got elected, and simply absorbed all the bozo rays Beck gives off.

Maybe she’s still a nice person when politics is not involved, but my estimation of her in general has now dropped a great deal. Anyone who likes Glenn Beck is not a person to be admired.

It is estimated that 78.4% of Americans are Christian, and about 80% of the prison population is Christian. Jews, similarly, are almost precisely represented in prisons (1.7% / 1.7%). Buddhists, at 0.7% / 1.18%, are somewhat over-represented. Most over-represented are Muslims (not Nation of Islam), who compromise 7.3% of the prison population despite making up only 0.6% of the general population; this most likely represents a disproportionately large African-American population in prisons, and is mirrored in other groups likely to be represented more in African-American groups (Rastafarian, Moorish, Nation of Islam).

Guess which group is vastly under-represented? Those without religion. They make up 16% of the general population, but only 0.2% of the prison population is non-religious, almost 1/100th of what you might expect it to be. One would think that this says something about atheists and morality–interesting, as Christians often seem to think that those without religion will be immoral by nature. Seems that’s not the case. Either that, or atheists are incredibly skilled at evading capture.

A “special comment,” if you will.

I have just become one of the crowd that is now firmly planted in the territory of forced partisanship. This has simply gone too far. If the Republicans have gone so thoroughly into the territory of anything-goes, balls-to-the-wall lying, fear-mongering and terrorizing, even resorting to thuggish mob shock-troop fear and intimidation, then they no longer deserve to be listened to.

From the very beginning, Obama tried–sincerely–to be bipartisan. Beginning with his first big initiative, the stimulus (which, by the way, now seems to be working), he bent way over backwards trying to include and appease the conservatives. He called them in for special White House meetings that even their Democratic colleagues did not enjoy. He integrated a large number of their demands into the bill, altering a great deal of the shape and form of the package until his own supporters started getting angry at how much was being given away. And then the Republicans voted, en masse, against the proposal and stabbed Obama in the back, accusing him of not being bipartisan.

The right wing and its propaganda arm Fox “News” began a steady drumbeat of vile, filthy smears that only heightened and heightened until you thought it could go no higher than its current crescendo, until it broke through into a whole new plane of insanely hateful rhetoric, until today accusations of Obama being a new Hitler, of forming death squads and death camps and death panels, of being a socialist, communist, terrorist, and worse have become so commonplace that they almost fade into the background of demented shrieking from the right wing of American discourse.

When it comes to the level that not only Sarah Palin, but a large number of prominent Republicans and incumbent politicians on the right begin a steady drone of bald-faced lies, like euthanizing grandma or forming death panels, lies proven to be lies beyond any shadow of a doubt and yet senators are stoking up fear and anger in crowds with these very lies–things have gone too far.

When the right wing creates such vehement anger and fear to the point where they start organizing angry mobs to overcome public meetings for the opposition, shouting down other Americans and their representatives, even to the point of coming to these meetings armed, things have gone much too far.

And when it becomes a celebrated act among the right for a man to wear a loaded weapon to a presidential event, holding a sign that declares that “tyrants” must be killed, and he clearly sees the president as a tyrant–when armed protesters bearing signs advocating the assassination of the president start populating presidential events, things have gone so far beyond the pale that it staggers the mind.

There is no chance for bipartisanship when one side goes to such hideous extremes. There can be no reasonable compromise. There in fact can be no respect for the contentions of such a sociopathic, toxic, lying, amoral movement so bought and owned by corporate interests that they would shred the very fabric of Democracy itself and promote violent extremism so as to prevent reasonable health care to pass to the great benefit of the people.

They. Have. Gone. Too. Far.

So, to hell with them. If no compromise is what they want, then give them exactly that. Do what we know is right and let them fester in their own cesspool of dark, twisted fantasy. They deserve no credence or respect.

A few months ago, Rush Limbaugh gave a speech to a fawning, cheering crowd of right-wingers in which he defined “bipartisanship” to mean Democrats “being forced to agree with us after we politically have cleaned their clocks and beaten them”; in a demonstration of Freudian projection, he then stated that this is what Democrats want to do to Republicans, and used that image to spur conservatives to fight like hell against any attempt at bipartisanship.

This warped, perverted view of how Democracy worked repulsed me. At the time, I could only imagine that I would never endorse such a horribly one-sided philosophy of governing. And I still don’t want to, which is why I have resisted for so long. A few months back, I hinted at this kind of idea, but it was more of a “wouldn’t it be nice if we could do this” fantasy, like wishing that Obama could be as dictatorial and aggressive as Bush, and not an actual, stubborn determination. But now there seems to be no choice–either we must forge ahead alone, or succumb to the madness which has engulfed the right wing. I feel sad, like part of the America I love has died–no, has been smothered by those seeking power and money.

But that’s the way it is. We pass the health care reform as it should be, no compromises, no concessions, and then just wait for the anger to (hopefully) peter out. Use what influence has been accrued to pass all the other things we know will work to repair the country and bring it back to a place where it might regain its former pedestal of esteem in the world as a leader of liberty, progress, and wealth.

Eventually, as the economy (hopefully) continues to improve, as health care gets better, as the state of the nation in general begins to recover, and as the nation becomes more used to these laws being not just acceptable but in fact productive and true to the American ideal, maybe we can head out of this darkness and come back to a place where actual bipartisanship is again an achievable goal instead of a hope dashed by an extremist right wing unwilling to even consider any form of cooperation. Maybe, someday, this demented nightmare of right-wing extremism will fade away as an embarrassing chapter of American politics.

I want my America back, indeed.

Apparently, the scammers who seem to abound in Nigeria must be slowly catching on to the fact that their con involving Nigerian oil ministers and $10 million stuck in bank accounts which need your kind assistance is getting a bit stale. Maybe it’s because once nearly every person on the planet have received more than 100 variations of the same scam letter, it becomes a bit of a cliché.

So now the scammers have come up with a surprisingly clever step-up, where they scam people for much larger amounts–$700 a pop–in a much more believable scam than the Nigerian-prince-down-on-his-luck story.

The new scam: they list an apartment on Craigslist, one that looks like a great bargain, explaining that they had to move to West Africa for some reason (I would think that the missionary story would work to the best effect) and are trying to rent the place from there. Prospective buyers are allowed to drive by, they say, but they can’t trust anyone with the keys until they receive the deposit of $700. Of course, the house does not belong to them and anyone foolish enough to send the deposit will probably get nothing more than extra attempts to shake them down for more money until the well runs dry. While there are fishy elements to the story as presented–just the mention of Africa in regards to payment of funds before getting anything will raise flags with many–overall, the scam seems far more sellable than the prior scam.

Ars Technica has an article which explains how one of their staff members was caught up because the scammer used their house as the one being rented–they got drowned in potential renters coming up to their door asking for a walk-through (the Nigerians apparently were unable to find a house which was at the time unoccupied).

It’s sad that the entire country of Nigeria, perhaps a large portion of Africa in fact, are getting such a crappy reputation from these scammers. I would imagine that if I had to actually move to Nigeria for some reason and had to do transactions from there, I would have a lot of trouble doing so. I also have to wonder how this impacts legitimate businesses in that country, especially ones trying to market themselves electronically.

Remember the right-winger who insisted that Stephen Hawking would be dead now if he were British, and then everyone laughed so hard because it’s pretty well-known that Hawking is British?

Well, it also turns out that he’s a big fan of NHS, Britain’s socialized insurance program–you know, the one that’s supposed to have sentenced him to death:

“I wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high quality treatment without which I would not have survived.”

–Stephen Hawking, August 11, 2009

I can only imagine that whoever wrote that original article is really embarrassed by now, and is thoroughly grateful that his or her name was not attached to that.

Actually, if you look at the original editorial now, you’ll see that is has been amended to leave out the Hawking reference:

Editor’s Note: This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK.

I love that. they did not correct themselves on the assertion that the British socialized medical system kills people with life-threatening illnesses; all they did was correct themselves on where Hawking lives. They instead inserted a long argument about how the British NHS actually does kill sick people. Just not Stephen Hawking, apparently. Still nimbly evading the NHS death squads, one supposes.

Is pirating media (books, music, video, software) illegal? Is it even “bad”? It’s easy enough to say it’s all illegal, or that “my position is right because those people are nothing more than petty crooks,” but the real situation is somewhat more complex than any of that. We have to realize that the world of “intellectual property” is literally what we make of it; it is defined by what we decide it to be, and is based not upon laws of physics but upon assumptions and assertions which are not necessarily set in stone–and may even have to change.

A great deal of the problem has to do with the pre-standing paradigm of entertainment content: for most of the past century, a lot of content has either been ‘free’ or available in a form that seems free. People do not equate commercials with cash payment, so generations have become used to getting music ‘for free’ over the radio, or video for free on the TV. Even printed material (books, magazines, etc.) are available for free via the public library. There are cash-paid versions of all of these media types, but more people experience them for free and expect that outlet. Then there was lending and borrowing, where one person would buy a book or a CD and would lend it to family and friends–not seen as criminal, but we would get content for free that way as well.

Then copying technology slowly emerged, and the “lending” paradigm transferred into that. People started copying music on cassette tapes, videotaping TV shows, even copying videotapes and so forth. The industry threw up objections, but for the most part, not much happened–for a few generations, we were copying music and video and there were no common penalties paid, and no great social stigma about it.

In comes the Internet, where even more content is free–you can get content from magazines and newspapers for free, where you used to have to pay for that. This, along with the new ability to digitally copy media, only intensified what had been going on in other forms for decades. Nothing new, only easier.

So we have a cultural paradigm that has been building over a very long period of time in which copyrighted media, intellectual property, has been regarded as free information in assumption if not in legal fact. Slowly but forcefully, the content owners have been pushing the counter-idea that this media is not free and that not paying for it is stealing, but they’re working against both a now-deeply-ingrained cultural sense of entitlement as well as the selfish disposition of people to defend something they enjoy doing with arguments that they should know are not fully justifiable. Like the cigarette smoker who uses data from ‘studies’ they know were funded by the tobacco industry to claim that smoking isn’t so bad.

Yes, the music industry *is* a collection of greedy corporate parasites who create nothing and use their powerful position to shake down the artists as much as possible and overcharge the customer while imposing unreasonable terms. But that does not change the fact that this is, I believe at least, legal (if more than a little unethical).

Yes, pirating may not actually have much of an impact on sales, profits, and incomes of artists, as emerging studies seem to suggest. It may even be that pirating has a positive effect on music sales; it may be that downward business trends are due only to a slow economy and poor decision-making at the industry level. It may be that artists lose money not from pirates but from the greedy SOB execs who use pirating as an excuse to shake down the artists. But none of that changes the fact that if media is copyrighted and privately owned, and if you acquire that media to possess (as opposed to borrowing as in a library loan or a friend lends you a CD which you listen to and return) without paying for it, then you have stolen it. It may not fulfill your sense of how things *should* be, but it is the way things *are*.

At the same time, we also have to face the fact that copying media is not considered a big deal. People may be initially shy with new acquaintances to reveal that they pirate music, software, or videos, but generally will not think badly of those who admit they do. It’s kind of like admitting that you go 10 mph over the speed limit–it’s technically illegal, but most people do it and few will really give you any guff about it at all. Those who do object may even be looked down upon as “goody two-shoes.”

All that said, we do have to understand that we are now living in an age where media is no longer what it used to be. The legal standards we apply today are based on a system in which copying was not even close to being as easy as it is today. We also have to remember that ownership, especially of intellectual property, is what we define it to be; it is not some magical absolute or law of nature. We can try to hold the ocean back with a broom, but unless the nature of pirating and policing changes radically towards a controlled environment, then either the current state of the ‘honor system’ (which not too many in fact follow) will persist, or a new legal structure must be hammered out.

In the meantime, suffice it to say that there is some grey in the issue.

(The bulk of this post was a comment I left on a post in Gizmodo.)

Not long ago we heard of a man at a Democratic town hall meeting who carried a gun–but it turns out he had a permit and very cooperatively agreed to put the gun in his car instead of wearing it at the event. Okay.

But now, MSNBC has footage of a protester outside the president’s town hall event–a protester who not only is wearing a gun, but bears a sign saying that “It is time to water the tree of liberty,” the ending of that quote being, “with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” And these protesters have made it crystal clear that they consider Obama to be a tyrant.

Remember back in the Bush days when protesters were moved to secluded “free speech zones” miles from the events the president attended, and people who wore t-shirts or held signs that were even borderline critical of Bush were promptly arrested?

Now we have people with guns holding up signs that might as well say “Time to Kill Obama” and apparently they are only being “closely watched.”

Yeah, Obama’s Amerika is a thuggish tyranny, all right. Not like the freedom-and-liberty days of the Bush administration.

Seriously, I am fully expecting there to be a serious injury or death at some point soon. But rather than dialing back the rhetoric like McCain futilely tried to do during the election last year, the right-wing political figures are only pouring gasoline on the fire with more and more explosive, not to mention completely fictional rhetoric.

Today was a big day in a small respect: Sachi and I went to see the movie Hachiko: A Dog’s Tale. Sachi is a huge Shiba Inu fan, and has made me more than just a passing fan as well–we look forward to moving into a place in the near future that allows dogs. While Hachi is an Akita, the Akita is close enough to a Shiba to make us happy, and besides, in the film, Hachi the puppy is played by a Shiba–and any Shiba puppy on film is a must-see for Sachi. (A book Sachi got on the movie claims that Shibas were used for the puppy scenes because the producers considered them easier to train.)

In Japan, most people know about Hachiko, especially in Tokyo; his statue is a popular meeting place in the Shibuya shopping area. The story of Hachiko is just as well known here in Japan. In this review, I assume that you know the basic story outline. Still, if you wish to avoid what you may consider a spoiler concerning a turning point in the story, then avoid reading after this paragraph, as I discuss a central plot point–but not one which really gives too much away, any more than it spoils the movie “Titanic” to know that at some point, they hit an iceberg. Still, I wanted to warn you just in case–someone who never heard of the Titanic before might enjoy the whole iceberg twist.

The story: a faithful dog comes to meet his master at the train station every evening upon his return home, and when the master, a college professor, dies at his school and does not return, Hachiko persists in coming to the station every day for nine years to wait for his master’s return. The very thought of such a loyal, sweet animal being so, well, doggedly committed to finding his master is bound to bring tears to most people’s eyes–and it didn’t fail here, with there being a considerable amount of sniffling and eye-dabbing in the theater. “Not a dry eye in the house” comes to mind. If you like schmaltzy tearjerkers and cute fuzzy dogs, then this is your kind of movie.

The basic story remains the same as the actual one, but builds up a new human drama around the dog story–which succeeds in not detracting from the central story at the same time. You never stray far from the dog, it’s clear that Hachi is the protagonist and we never spend more than two or three minutes away from him at any one time. Nevertheless, the characters are fairly well developed for what they are–supporting roles. Joan Allen does a good job as the wife reluctant to allow another dog in the family after the last one left them. Jason Alexander has a bit of fun as the self-centered station manager, and recognizable character actor Erick Avari does an excellent job as a hot dog and coffee vendor outside the station. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa did surprisingly well as the Japanese expert at the college. But the dog is the star, and does a good job of keeping our attention.

I contrast this with a movie from last year in Japan, “The Tale of Mari & 3 Puppies,” about a Shiba Inu dog owned by a family in Niigata when a large earthquake hits the region. The movie, billed primarily as a dog movie, mostly focused on the family, featured more than a little over-acting from the supporting cast, and failed to show us the cute doggies so much. In “Hachi,” it’s the reverse–you get lots of dog time, but also a nicely-rounded drama with good acting all around.

A few things were overdone, but not to bad effect. At the movie’s outset, we see Hachi as having been sent, unattended in a bamboo cage, all the way from Japan–not just Japan, but from a Buddhist temple in Japan–only to be lost on the last leg of his journey when he falls off of a handcart at Gere’s train station. That (a) the person pulling the cart could be so careless and (b) that whatever local person paid so much money to have the dog shipped and then never inquire as to what happened to him, well, is kind of pushing it. It feels as if Gere wanted to put in a nice Buddhist reference and have Hachiko’s tale be a bit more dramatic. You kind of roll your eyes at all this, but it doesn’t get in the way of the story too much. None of the overdone bits go so far as to really distract from the movie, and they do work well at the emotional level. In the end, what you have is a fun little drama about an adorable, faithful dog with a tearful ending; the movie does very well being what it is supposed to be.

The original story of Hachiko is not completely without controversy. There are some who claim that the story was deliberately popularized in fascist pre-war Japan as a means of inculcating loyalty to the emperor and to the state–the idea being that Hachiko’s utter faithfulness up to the bitter end was a model that the government wanted the people to follow in supporting the state. Of course, Gere’s film does not come close to this; there is even a specific reference to loyalty as pertaining to those one loves. One would hardly expect Gere, a strong Tibet supporter, to allow the story to be about loyalty to oppressive governments. Other Hachiko-doubters contend that Hachiko was not being faithful to his owner, but was just a stray dog that came to Shibuya Station for the food scraps fed to him by the merchants, and that Hachiko’s story was built up as more of a publicity device to attract customers to the area.

Whatever the case, the story persists, and as a story, it’s a good one. If you watch Hachi, be prepared with a good supply of hankies.

The actual Hachiko.

Among the various domains I own and manage, the oldest is poza.net, site of my long-defunct “Teaching in Japan” site, a project I abandoned back in 1998. Wow. In Internet time, that’s ancient.

But I still keep the main page alive as a home page, filled with links that I commonly use. That basic page design has been the same since, oh, seven or eight years ago, maybe even more. Thoroughly tired of it, I have wanted to change it for quite some time–but never found the time until tonight, when I spent, I think, about three hours generating the entire page from the ground up. (Doing this kind of thing is like painting or meditating–you lose all track of time.)

This time I went nuts (for a simple link page), using some nice flourishes. The seamless tiled background is one I made myself, based on a photograph of marble I took in Greece this Spring. The header titles are also based on that original image.

The rest of the page is mostly just links, but dressed up real nice with CSS. The tables and their header graphics are all placed by using CSS fixed positioning. The tables are actually two tables each, one laid on top of the other; each has a table with the links proper, and a table beneath it with a mostly-transparent background color which allows the marble page background image to show through. I had to create two tables for each because if you make a table transparent, the content goes transparent as well. (Maybe there’s a way around that–I’ll have to look for it.)

On top of all that, the color scheme is relatively coordinated and easy on the eyes, with a nice hover effect for the links. And finally, the table header graphics have nice CSS drop shadows to complete the page. You may not like the design, but for me it was more an exercise in CSS than anything else–and to me, it looks nicer than the old page.

Just one caveat: if you still use Internet Explorer 6, then stay away–the page will look incredibly nasty. Which more and more sites will probably look like for you, as IE6 is completely defunct and was never any good even before it became hopelessly outdated. I haven’t tested my new page with IE7 or 8, only with Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. I steadfastly refuse to pay any attention at all to that craptacular browser when making personal pages. (Forgive me if I offend you on this, but I speak as a web page designer–if you don’t understand, just ask a web page designer.)

If you think the links are useful for you, then feel free to use it as a start page or a jump page. A word of caution: it requires a browser window at least 1280 x 800 pixels large. Smaller than that, and stuff drifts off the edge. Remember, I was making this mostly for myself and so didn’t worry about minimal screen sizes and junk like that. Ahh, selfish web authoring. Mmmmm.

People have been talking about ending the filibuster, primarily because it has been abused so prolifically by the right wing, which uses it as a political weapon instead of the procedural safety check for which it was intended. Though they accused Democrats of abusing the filibuster before, Democrats under Bush were the very picture of restraint in comparison to the GOP today. Democrats used the filibuster mostly to block the worst, extremist judges that Bush tried to foist on the court (they blocked only 2% of Bush’s nominees, whereas Republicans in the 90’s blocked 30% of Clinton’s). Republicans, on the other hand, are using the filibuster on virtually everything that isn’t to their liking. When Democrats took over the Senate a few years ago, use of the filibuster exploded to historic highs.

Personally, I am not a big fan of getting rid of the filibuster; I think that it tends to be more useful to have a brake on legislation than to allow the party in power to do whatever it wants. The case can be made, however, that when something is abused to such an extreme extent, that even something useful may no longer be viable to keep around. Emergency brakes in passenger cars on trains are a great idea, but if people start pulling them three times a day for no good reason, I bet they’d be disabled and quick.

One thing that would be fun to watch is the Republican reaction: a few years ago, they said the filibuster was anti-Democratic and perhaps un-American and wanted to get rid of it themselves, so if Democrats tried to end it, they’d have to suddenly argue against their own points. Sure, Republicans are flaming hypocrites already because they are over-using the same filibuster they earlier condemned and vilified, but they’re doing so quietly now, and are not forced to make a vocal debate in which their prior opposition to the procedure would be thrown in their faces right away.

However, one will never lose any money betting on the Republican talent for reaching new lows of hypocrisy, and no doubt they would find a way to be righteously outraged without the tiniest scintilla of shame.

A moot point in any case–Dems are not going to do away with the filibuster.

Sachi and I were woken up just after 5am this morning by a quake just as strong as the one two days ago. Not much to report specifically aside from the usual shaking and swaying–and then we went back to sleep. (It was five in the morning!)

According to the news, this one was 6.5–a touch weaker than before–but had an epicenter much closer to the coast, this time just off Izu Peninsula. And unlike before, the magnitude of the quake was felt much more strongly near the center. In Tokyo, the strength felt was 4 on the Japanese scale of 7, but nearer the epicenter, the strength was a “low” 6–enough to throw items off shelves. Several dozen people were hurt, none reported killed so far.

Two large quakes in such a short time are certain to stoke speculation that a third, and much bigger one, is on its way. Wheee. Let’s hope, however, that these largish temblors are serving to release tension in the fault lines, and are doing the reverse of what people may fear.

My belief is that no private-sector entity can survive over a long period of time competing against the government. The public option will be written by politicians. It will be generous. Nobody in my business worries about the bottom line.

— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

So, conservatives hate socialized medicine because it will cover everything and private industry will not be able to compete.

No, wait a minute–I thought they were against it because with socialized medicine there couldn’t possibly be enough money to go around, meaning we’d get rationing and “Death Panels”:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Talk about playing both ends of the field. Of course, both are wrong. We’ve had Medicare for more than 40 years and it hasn’t gone the way Graham is saying such plans would; as for “rationing,” Graham is more correct in that government plans would be more generous than private insurance–but wrong in his contention that this would break the bank. By removing the profit margin for private corporations, you can give more care and save money. Instead of paying huge amounts to private insurers, you simply pay a lot to the government. More for less, and it works. Ask the Rest of the Planet.

And Stephen Hawking, by the way, is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. That’s Cambridge, England, not Massachusetts. Hawking, as Josh Marshall points out and anyone who knows anything about this esteemed man knows well, has lived in England all his life. Somehow he avoided the Death Squads regularly sent out by the Socialized Death Care Ministry to kill of anyone with a disease. Pretty nimble for a guy in a wheelchair.

Oh, wait! Obama is set to present Hawking with the Presidential Medal of Freedom tomorrow! It must be a secret plot to euthanize him! Someone warn him!

When, by the way, will the media stop pretending that these people are not lying imbeciles?

This is exactly the kind of post I wish I had thought of. Brilliant. Stroszek at DailyKos says we should make the following concessions in the health care bill:

1. We will not euthanize your grandmother.
2. Rahm Emanuel’s brother will not kill Sarah Palin’s baby.
3. The government will not nationalize hospitals and other health service providers.
4. We will make the health care reform bill available for all Americans to read as soon as possible.
5. We will not subsidize abortions with your hard-earned tax dollars.
6. We will not allow the government to have direct access to your bank account.
7. We will not provide illegal immigrants with unlimited free health care.
8. Private health insurance will not be eliminated.
9. You will not be issued a “National Health Insurance ID.”
10. There will be no super-secret-awesome health care program for ACORN employees.

Stroszek outlines each in detail in his post. I would add that Barack Obama must cease the creation of his enemies list, and Democrats add a provision promising that the Constitution will not be amended to turn the country into a Communist dictatorship. I know that these are not directly related to health care reform, but a lot of the same Americans seem to be worried about these things, so might as well be on the safe side.

This whole concessions idea is so absurdly ironic that I honestly think that Democrats should, in all seriousness, propose such amendments to the actual bill. Since so many right-wingers out there actually seem to believe that these things are true, they might actually be satisfied to see them “taken out” of the bill. And of course, the whole point of the irony is that Democrats would not be giving up a single thing. Republicans, on the other hand, would be not only be put in the ludicrous position of voting on a measure that calls attention to their own insanely paranoid-schizophrenic lies, they would also be robbed of all their favorite talking points, and would have to work hard to come up with all new ones.

This would also probably garner a lot of attention in the press, highlighting the absurd lies which the media currently presents as “one side of the story,” as if they were actually possibly true. Such provisions actually entered into legislation would attract a lot of attention and would be a pretty funny story–something the press would recognize more as “news” than, oh, say, saving the lives of millions of Americans with affordable health care.

Seriously, I think this is brilliant and Democrats in Congress should make it official. I’m not kidding.

Quake in Tokyo, 7:56 pm. Sizable.

Wow, that was probably the strongest earthquake we’ve felt in our Ikebukuro apartment, and the strongest temblor I recall for quite a long time. It may have been magnified by the fact that we’re fairly high up in a tall building, but still, that was sizable.

News reports mark it as being centered in the Pacific, just south of Shizuoka Prefecture, maybe only 30km off the coast–but it was pretty big, at a magnitude of 6.5 to 7.0 on the Richter scale. On the Japanese scale of 1 to 7, Central Tokyo was marked as a “4.” A 2 is barely noticeable, and a 3 is easily felt and relatively common.

But if that was a 4, I don’t want to feel a 6. Even a 5 would be pretty scary. This 4 was bad enough.

Update: The Bosai site is saying that there was a quake at 7:55 200 km south of the 7:56 quake which measured 7.5 on the Richter scale!

Now more sites are identifying the more southern epicenter.

Otherwise, the quake info looks strange–locations close to the quake felt is less strongly than many places 1-200 km more distant. Looking at the strength as felt on the ground, one would think that the quake was centered north-east of Tokyo.